User:Nandesuka/Todo

Articles to be cleaned up

  • Phil Katz - terrible grammar, very clumsy reading.

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Articles to be created

Strikethrough means that the article is "done enough" that i'm concentrating elsewhere for the moment.

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Category Work

RMS Criticisms (draft)

Stallman is characterized by some as being extremely difficult to work with. The XEmacs team, in particular, has catalogued a list of specific complaints about working with RMS that led them to fork off their project. [http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_4.html] These include:

  1. The high overhead and burdensome nature of the legal paperwork RMS requires to collaborate on software,
  2. RMS's seeming inability to cope with abstract data structures, which are a practical necessity in writing any sufficiently complex software product that is still maintainable.
  3. RMS's unwillingness to compromise on API issues.
  4. A "tit for tat" attitude towards compromise. Ben Wing claims that Stallman's attitude towards compromise is motivated primarily by politics rather than by the desire to reach the best technical solution.

Jamie Zawinski released an archive of email messages detailing the history of the FSF Emacs/XEmacs split.[http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html] He discusses specific shortcomings of the FSF Emacs design, but at a high level attributes the problems with FSF Emacs not simply to technology, but to Stallman's inability to work with others. Zawinski says:

[Lucid Emacs was run] in a much more open, inclusive way than RMS ran his project. I was not just willing, but eager, to delegate significant and critical pieces of the project to other hackers once they had shown that they knew what they were doing. RMS was basically never willing to do this with anybody.

Stallman's insistence on using the term "GNU/Linux" to describe Linux-based operating systems is perceived as high-handed by some; Larry McVoy, author of Bitkeeper characterized this as "foolish and greedy".[http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9904.0/0301.html]. Linus Torvalds has opined that while GNU/Linux may be an appropriate name for a GNU-based distribution, using that name for Linux in general is "just ridiculous." Others believe that Stallman is trying to coopt the hard work of others to compensate for the failure of the HURD to reach viability or commercial success.[http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.1/1883.html]. Still others point out that the demand to prepend the "GNU" name onto Linux gives short shrift to other software projects, such as the X Window System, that are arguably just as important as the Gnu tools,[http://www.ties.org/deven/gnu-linux.html] and that the right to name a system belongs, from a moral and ethical perspective, with those who publish it. [http://www.usermode.org/docs/gnulinux.html]